the wombatcave

Saw this link while trying to track down zougan stuff; it's a book about Japanese material culture from 1902. Haven't had a chance to look at it properly, but in the meantime might be useful to other people:

http://books.google.com/books?id=NO-zr99iRiwC&dq=brinkley+japan

Addendum:

The main text of http://books.google.com/books?id=VF-8kqXnpoIC&pg=RA1-PA326&lpg=RA1-PA326 is a handbook of colloquial Japanese originally written in 1908.

(This is going to be a very rambly sort of entry as I try to hash things out. Alas.)

In RK's Jinchuu arc, the Yukishiro family plays an important part; considering their various associations and characteristics wrt winter, the end of the Tokugawa era, and white hair, their family name might be expected to have the kanji 雪 (snow) + 白 (white). However, it's actually written 雪代, where most of the time I've usually seen the second kanji glossed as "age/generation/era". But now that I actually poke at Jim Breen's kanji lookup for that character, I'm not sure that's really the right meaning either, at least for the "shiro" pronunciation.( Read more... )

Personal working notes again, rather than a likely useful resource :b ( Read more... )

(meant more as a reminder to me than a useful resource)

From a discussion of the game of go: "The vagueness inherent in atsumi is why it can be translated often as influence, and the concreteness of atsusa is why it can be rendered as solidity." (from atsui, "thick"; different kanji from atsui, "hot")( Read more... )

After encountering "fungible" in Sunday's Dilbert just before we headed out for lunch, I thoroughly annoyed the wombat-consort by making him explain the word to me, since I didn't recall having seen it before and hadn't had time to look it up. (Also, I think Scott Adams is definitely turning into an asshole, on which more later.)

As I'd thought, it's from the same Latin root as "function", though until I hit Cassell's just now, I'd forgotten it was actually a deponent verb: fungor, fungi, functus sum, not *fungo, fungere etc. So "functionally equivalent" is more or less, um, fungible with "fungible". However, the word "fungus" comes from a completely different root, having originated as a poetic cognate from the same Greek root as "sponge", the squooshiness of which IIRC also relates to the Sphinx (which Graves glossed as "strangler", modulo his usual sodium content) as well as "sphincter". (Ahem.)

(While I can kinda see Adams' argument, it's pitched on a completely different level than the way my brain cell operates. Maybe it's just me, but if I were going to buy a hybrid car, geopolitical economics would be somewhere down my list of reasons behind "I won't have to spend as much of my own personal money on gasoline." And once fuel-efficent technology improves to a certain level, that's likely to be the most popular reason for spreading to a nation/world-wide level, not counting the conspicuous-consumption Hummer hordes. Of course, then you end up with interesting supply/demand seesaws if there's a sufficient decrease in fuel demand to depress its price, thus decreasing the sense of consumer urgency for convservation, but hey.)

And then there's the Japanese slang term yanki(i), often transliterated as "Yankee" as an easy assumption at its source-- it refers to a certain type of bad-behavior kids who often sport bleached-blond hair. However, according to a conflicting etymology which feels better to me somehow, it's actually a purely Japanese formation based on Kansai-ben, in which the already-informal negative copula ja nai (from de wa nai) may get further clipped to yan, perhaps immediately followed by the sentence-final Kansai-ben particle ke whose significance I have thoroughly forgotten, though now I wonder if it's related to Inuyasha's favorite exclamation, "Keh!" So the initial form was supposedly yanke, which eventually morphed into the adjective yanki(i). Not that it really matters, but the Kansai-ben explanation just seems so much more interesting.

And finally, last fall there was an article in The Economist about Japanese age demographics whose online archive doesn't seem to have all of the charts I remember. Among other discontinuities, such as the sharp drop in the age group (especially males) born around 1920, there was a sharp single-year dip for the birth year 1966. While I'd remembered Kittredge Cherry's essay in Womansword about the dread of Fire Horse women, somehow I hadn't really believed her about just how much reluctance there was from prospective parents to give birth to such a child. It was somewhat reassuring to see that the gender ratio was normal among the relatively few Fire Horse births in Japan, though I'm not sure how much that was attributable to the unavailability of prenatal gender-checking, or whether the hinoeuma stigma applies to boys as well-- when we were at my parents' house for the holidays, I noticed a novel whose blurb's invocation of the destructive passions of Fire Horses seemed to be applying them to a male protagonist, which I found rather funny since my brother was born in 1966.

(Rurouni Kenshin's Yukishiro Tomoe would've been born in the antepenultimate batch of hinoeuma. He really should've known she'd be trouble :b )

Addendum: another Japanese slang term, otemba, also describes unruly women; despite its close similarity to the English "tomboy", it's actually from the Dutch ontembaar, which describes a wild horse which can't be broken. ("You can tame a dog with food. You can tame a man with money. But nothing can tame a horse of the Fire Year"? There's gotta be some better translation for the verb Saitou used, whose meaning seems to be somewhere between "tame/train a wild animal" and "raise a child" iirc, but maybe there isn't and I don't.)